I Unlocked My Wallpaper So I Could See My Life, But Then I Unlocked My Life So I Could See My Wallpaper

It’s 3pm right now and I’ve already been in awe five times today. 

It’s 3pm right now and my Windows wallpaper has already changed five times today. 

This morning it was Neuschwanstein castle, it was white and pointed against a grey sky, up on its rock, the grass underneath it that perfect green I only see right after rain, almost too green, dotted with dark fir trees climbing up the hillside. I went downstairs to make a coffee, came back, and it was a glacier. Blue-white, cracked into deep crevasses, the ice catching a light but only around the edges, two penguins standing right next to each other on a flat white stretch, their black backs and white bellies the only sharp and perfect contrast in the whole frame. Then a canyon at golden hour, the rock a glowing red, then orange, then a deep rust in the cracks, layered like the earth had been sliced open to reveal some kind of treasure, the shadows long and sharp almost black where the light didn’t reach. Then a single drop of water on a leaf, round and heavy and impossibly clear, holding a tiny perfect upside-down version of whatever was around it, the leaf’s veins running underneath it, dark green going to a delicate yellow at the edges. And then, just now, a savanna at dusk, one acacia tree on its own, flat-topped, branches spread out wide and thin against everything, the horizon flat and dry, the sky a stunning orange and purple and a kind of grey all at once, a few clouds catching the last bit of light from underneath.

Every time I see those images, however eerily unnatural, fabricated, manipulated, I enter a sort of ecstasy, I’m absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty¹, I am starstruck by reality. Sometimes, I briefly think of all the people I know who might be looking at the same default image right now, somewhere, staring or not staring, distracted or not, and then that thought dissolves too, because what’s left is just the pull in my chest and the stopping, the looking, the impossibility of looking away.

I know my awe, my contemplation, doesn’t come from the fact that I necessarily want to be in any of those places. When I look at the glacier on my laptop screen, I don’t want to feel the cold, I don’t necessarily want to see what’s around it either, whatever is in the shot is more than enough already. I don’t have a sudden longing for my hiking boots or a flight to Iceland or whatever. The image never functions as an advertisement for itself. The place it depicts actually recedes to the point it becomes abstract, and almost irrelevant–and what I’m left with is something more like a… hum… like a portal.

Like a portal… not to the glacier, but to somewhere else. Some other reality, definitely adjacent to this one, but that I seem to only be able to access from the screen of my company-supplied Lenovo Thinkbook PC.

On my screen, the glacier sheds its signifiers the way a word does when you repeat it too many times, and what’s left is something stranger, more bizarre, more open: the pure image of a thing, floating free of the thing itself. 

Glacier glacier glacier glacier glacier glacier glacier glacier. 

Just the idea of a glacier, just the portal. And through the portal, for twenty seconds, just while I wait for radio.braquage.fun to load to check whether @chevremaudite posted something in the chat or to check that I haven’t just missed a track by Malibu on the ambient-only station of the webradio, something I can only describe as awe.

Computers have always tried to control a version of this phenomenon. Early interface design mimicked the physical world–desks, folders, files, a trash can. The desktop as a metaphor for an actual desk, natural user interaction, making the unnatural make sense by dressing it in the clothes of the familiar. But it is true that we are now so deep into the digital that there is increasingly little left to mimic.² The metaphors have run out and the desktop is no longer a desk; it is just itself, its own territory–and the screen has become its own reality, with its own rules about what things mean and where they can take us. It’s like the system accidentally left a window open and… the glacier glacier glacier glacier glacier glacier glacier got through. 

Sometimes I think about the glacier glacier glacier glacier glacier glacier glacier glacier glacier and about why encountering it here, compressed, frictionless and uninvited makes it more available as an object of pure looking.

This is when I enter the other reality. It’s not nature versus digital and not real versus fake either. The glacier is real, I even know from doing my due diligence that it’s located in east Antarctica and is called Lambert. The canyon is real too, I’ve been there in 2018 on a Bruce-Springsteen-themed roadtrip. But on my screen they have become a different version of real, one that has been relieved of its original context, its weight, its requirement that I do something about it. Freed from all of that, the image becomes available for a completely different kind of encounter, one where I just look, and where meaning can slip through.

The reason why I am compelled to make the glacier mean something, perhaps, is because it is one of those things that is both weird and eerie, (in Mark Fisher’s terms), one of those things that means so little and is so made-up that it becomes a perfect subject of the other reality. The weird, for Fisher, is an intrusion, something from outside slipping into a world it has no business being in, a wrongness lodged where it shouldn’t fit. The eerie works differently, through absence: something missing that should be there, or something present where there should be nothing at all. The wallpaper, I’d argue, splits along exactly this line. Its form is weird. The glacier’s arrival is an intrusion, one reality breaching another with no transition and no permission asked. But its content is eerie. What’s missing is everything that would have anchored the glacier as a glacier: the cold, the wind, the sound of ice settling. None of that survives the file. What’s left is the shape of the thing with the substance of it failed out, present and absent in the same few seconds, and that combination, weird arrival, eerie hollowness, might be the closest I can get to actually defining what I’ve been calling awe this whole time.

This is, I think, what I actually mean when I talk about the wallpaper–not the image, but the act, the few seconds, minutes sometimes, after I turn my computer on, before I open Chrome, before I type in radio.braquage.fun to check @chevremaudite’s messages in the chat, before anything starts, just whatever’s sitting there waiting for me, of looking as a practice, of projecting, interpreting, of feeling into. Of making meaning out of something that arrived without asking to be meaningful. Inside a system, which by the way, is almost perfectly engineered to prevent exactly this, a compressed image file of a glacier glacier glacier glacier has just made me hold my breath and think.

But inevitably, feeling something new, to which I can never quite get used to–how many times have you been in awe today? probably not as many times as I did–makes me wonder in what reality am I reading into, and why does it work here, on this Lenovo Thinkbook laptop screen, and not anywhere else.

Everything is a thing (well… it’s not… cf Lacan, not Heidegger, et al, but oh well) until it goes digital, and then it becomes a non-thing, which is very loosely what Byung-Chul Han wrote about in his 2021 book, Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld, or at least that’s more or less how I want to interpret it for the sake of my ode to wallpapers. 

A printed book, a wooden table, an analog watch, these have solidity, they anchor you somehow, they ask something of you in return for your attention, even if it’s just the small act of having to hold them. A glacier, obviously, is a thing too. An enormous and ancient and crushing thing. But a photograph of a glacier, a glacier glacier glacier glacier glacier glacier glacier glacier glacier compressed into a file sitting on my screen for four seconds before my radio.braquage.fun chats load–that is, technically, a non-thing (@beaudrillard). It’s weightless and transient, it’s gone before I’ve even finished looking at it.

The whole logic of the digital, the feed, the scroll, the algorithm et al… is built on the assumption that non-things breed more non-things. That the glacier-image is just another fragment in the deluge, indistinguishable from the meme or the reel or the breaking news. Something to consume and move past, because there is always more. The infrastructure of information is, of course, designed so that you can always go elsewhere, are always called elsewhere, and so you never actually linger anywhere. 

So perhaps the wallpaper is a portal to lingering. It takes the non-thing, the image, the fragment, the piece of weightless digital nothing, and by stripping it of its original signifiers, by detaching it completely from the glacier’s actual context, it accidentally creates a third thing (yes, sorry, I know, I just invoked the third thing). When it’s there looking back at me, it’s not a glacier, and it’s not the non-thing either. It’s something else: an open image, floating free, available for meaning in a way neither the glacier nor a regular photograph of the glacier ever could be. 

It becomes an other-thing–a non-thing that has been so thoroughly freed from its original weight that it becomes weirdly available for me to impose my own. And I do, every time. Five times today.

I like to think of this as a somewhat disciplined act. The awe is enough to hook me, but I know I have to be open enough to receive whatever arrives and present enough to actually stay with it. And yet the other-thing, by arriving completely unasked-for and already halfway out the door, somehow creates the exact conditions for it: a thing I cannot hunt for, cannot save to a folder, cannot return to on demand.

I can only catch it now or lose it… so I catch it.

Fisher’s weird and eerie exist to decenter the human subject. Lovecraft, he says, derealises the factual and realises the fictional, takes the solid, agreed-upon world and shows it to be thin, fragile and basically improvised, while the impossible cosmic stuff somehow lodges in you deeper than the factual ever did. I think the wallpaper does a small and more domestic version of this same move. For a few seconds–minutes, when I’m lucky–it derealises the actual glacier, the cold real one with weight and weather, makes it feel like the less convincing of the two versions, and it realises this other thing instead, the image, the act, the glacier glacier glacier glacier glacier glacier, the non-glacier.

The sign I’m picking up on underneath all of this is the lingering itself, the contemplation, a few seconds of actually staying with something instead of scrolling past it. And it’s only here, in this small and accidental clearing of staying, that anything like creativity even becomes possible, that is where creativity quietly comes from and nowhere else, not in the looking itself but in the staying, the not moving on, the decision, even an accidental one forced on you by a loading screen, to let something sit there until it means something. 

I don’t get new thoughts from glancing, I only get them from lingering, and the wallpaper, of all things, is where I’m still doing that.

Meaning-making is how you stay a subject rather than becoming an object of the system. The feed processes you and in return gives you the sensation of being connected to everything while actually connecting you to nothing in particular. The wallpaper is the opposite move: you take something that arrives as pure information and you insist on it meaning something. You force narrative into it. You impose on it the power to make you linger, because the act of reading it as a sign is how you stay a person who reads the world… rather than… a person… the world reads.

The wallpapers have colonised my daydreams. They have become a place I can step into in my head, it’s not a fantasy of being there, but of looking at them. The portal is always open, it turns out, even when the screen is closed. I often find myself routing back to it, to that quality of looking, that particular variety of awe that the wallpaper has trained me into, and which I have learned to recognise as a cradle for ideas, new and old.

Lingering by a Windows wallpaper is a completely private act of meaning-making. A small, stubborn refusal to let the world stay abstract… sometimes.

The wallpaper is already on its way out. I look.

Sometimes, it looks back.